“Charlene! The mouse is here!” I yell out. Everyone looks at me. Charlene, who is several meters away, yells, “Grab him!”
Oh God, I’m going to have to touch the thing. I wince… reaching out.It’s fine, I tell myself. It’s like acat, but smaller. It’s just a pet—it doesn’t carry the plague. But… it was from a biology lab. Maybe it carries… I don’t know. Experimental diseases.
Just as I’m crouching down to grab Roland, a green plastic berry basket lowers on top of him, trapping the mouse with his chunk of cheddar.
It’s Miles who trapped the mouse. “I dumped the strawberries in with the cheese,” he explains.
The two men whose blanket we’re invading clap with glee. “The mouse is trapped!” one of them announces loudly. Which makes many others on the hill clap along with them. Presumably the people who had the heebie-jeebies about the fact that there was a mouse on the loose.
I look at Miles, wincing. This is ridiculous. This date might be an even bigger disaster than the last one.
But Miles’s face isn’t showing anger, like after the fish incident. Or annoyance. Or even his usual smugness. His whole face has transformed into the biggest smile. And then he bows with a huge flourish as everyone cheers that he caught the runaway mouse.
I laugh. Disaster date aside, I managed to make Miles Desai enjoy himself.
CHAPTER NINESUNSET IN THE PARK VIBES
Once Roland is safely zipped into his backpack house along with Agnes and Albert, Charlene, who looks like she was just reunited with her lost child, tells us she needs to get the mice home.
“No, stay,” I urge her. Despite this rodent fixation, a part of me is still kind of hoping Charlene and Miles could have something. Miles likes animals—or at least I think he does. He didn’t seem to have an issue with Zuri, even when she hissed at him.
Charlene shakes her head vigorously. “You don’t understand thetraumathese babies havealreadygone through.” She leans in to speak closer to us, presumably so the mice won’t hear. “They came from thepsychologydepartment.” She shudders. “I don’t know what studies they were in, but I know they have lasting damage. I need to get them back to their safe space.” She puts her backpack on and starts climbing up the hill toward the streetcar stop. From the mesh screen on the front of the bag, I can see Agnes, Albert, and Roland looking at us. I wave goodbye to the mice.
“Your friend is a little strange,” someone with a faint European accent says. It’s one of the guys Roland stole the cheddar from. The people who were sitting between us andthem seem to have left. Probably not mice fans either.
“Oh, she’s not really a friend,” I say. “We work near each other. I didn’t know she’d be bringing mice.”
The second guy, the smaller of the two, laughs. He’s really cute with curly black hair. “Honestly, it’s not that weird for Toronto.” This guy’s accent is pure Toronto local. “Remember, this is the city that birthed the Ikea Monkey.”
I continue to chat with the two guys for a bit. The European one, David, is new to town—he’s from Denmark and moved to Toronto for a job. The other one, Ali, has lived here his whole life and is an artist who owns a custom T-shirt business. They’re on their second date and look so happy. We exchange Instagram handles.
When I tell the guys to enjoy the sunset and turn back to Miles, I fully expect him to say we may as well leave too. But he doesn’t. He looks at me curiously. The sky is doing that thing where it brightens a bit before the sunset, and the slightest pinky-orange color is high in the air.
“How do you do that?” Miles asks.
“Do what?”
“Make everyone your best friend after minutes of conversation.”
“I’m a people person. But”—I smile—“I didn’t makeyoumy best friend when we met.”
He blinks. “Yeah, no one would ever call me a people person.”
“I think you are. You just need to warm up to people a bit.”
We’re both silent for a while. Maybe I’m not always a people person because I have no idea what to say to Miles about Charlene.
“So… Charlene seems… nice,” I finally say. “Really smart, right?”
He raises a brow. “Um, I don’t think bringing mice to a park is a verysmartthing to do. What if someone brought a snake?”
“Okay, so Charlene has a small quirk, but you have to admit, I did better with her than Abbey. You two seemed to be getting along great until she opened her backpack. I now know your type. Next time I’ll do even better.”
He chuckles, stretching his legs in front of him. “I think the rodent obsession is more than a small quirk. And I don’t think there was much of a spark anyway. Before Roland’s escape, all she talked about was school. And she spends all her free time in the animal labs.”
“So, you’d prefer someone more well-rounded?”
He laughs at that. “You’re zero for two, Sana. I thought you were an excellent matchmaker.”
